Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  I called the school, but Jane isn’t enrolled there anymore. There are no Los Angeles listings for Jane or Samantha Preston. Since she and I last spoke nineteen weeks ago, she’s called Mother twice. Mother feels guilty about this; I’m just thankful she’s still speaking to one of us. No matter what Mother asks, Jane only wants to talk about what birds Mother has seen out the kitchen window. Mother says Jane sounds cheerful enough, but thinks she isn’t sleeping well. Jane’s calls have come just as Mother was waking up, which means that in California, it was four a.m. It’s hard not to fill the spaces in between those lines with worry, but both times Jane called direct and not collect, so she must have a little money. Any small, fleeting glimpse of her is better than nothing at all.

  One weekend I was passing around a joint and watching Saturday Night, still cracking up over something Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi had done before the last commercial break, when all of a sudden this skinny girl with spiked hair and black makeup across her eyes started singing “Mommy is sick, Mommy is sick,” in a voice like her head was on fire. I was watching the same way as everybody else until the guitarist took a solo and the girl put the microphone between her legs and yanked off her dress. Who’s that? I asked. I was feeling warm all over partly because I was stoned and partly because underneath her dress, the girl’s boobs were barred with black tape. That’s Franny Panic, someone said. The girl jerked the microphone back to her mouth and started singing “Mommy is sick,” wearing nothing but fishnets and a line of black tape across her chest, before the show cut quick to another commercial. When it came back, the girl was gone and Chevy Chase was making a joke about downtown New York fashions.

  I got her civilian name from a copy of Rolling Stone, though by the time I called the Manhattan operator and asked for Francis Pell’s number, I’d convinced myself that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. This meant when a pissed-off voice said, “Who’s this?” into the phone, I was totally unprepared. Samantha, I told her, even though I hadn’t spoken that name out loud in twelve years. Suddenly, I realized I didn’t know what time it was in L.A., not to mention New York, so when that same pissed-off voice growled, “Samantha who?” it wasn’t a question I felt prepared to answer.

  When Under the Fence came out, Monica Kay was the name in the credits, finishing something I’d started the night I gave myself that name at the motel. I’d missed so many of my Holy Mount classes by then that I probably would have dropped out anyway. Even if I’d been willing to keep taking “Samantha Series” money to cover my tuition, it seemed stupid to shell out for an education when I was getting paid for one each time I got a part. Not that I was making much, but even before Under the Fence, it was usually enough to eat and pay rent. Then came Parkland and No Going Back and Fever Dream and a certain kind of independence.

  People who like the kind of movies that got made in the ’70s know who I am, but since moving back to New York, I’ve stuck to plays. I don’t like the way movies are done in bits and pieces, with the only real meaning made afterward by the editor in postproduction. Also, I realized pretty quickly after I started in movies that performing for a camera inside a locked room felt too much like hiding, like I was building a relationship and then ducking out on its care and feeding, which felt too painfully familiar. That might not make sense to anyone besides me, but it doesn’t need to.

  Though I think my grandmother would have enjoyed seeing me in a play, by the time I was performing back east, travel wasn’t an option for her. She never said anything about the movies. This means either she didn’t see them or she didn’t like them. If I had to guess, I’d say she chose not to see them in order to avoid not liking them. Grandma was a practical person, and by the last decade of her life, our relationship was already complicated enough.

  114. Two young women walking and talking, Cleveland, 1976

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, OCTOBER 1976: As usual, I’d taken the bus halfway to the Art Institute so I could walk the rest. The two of them couldn’t have been older than nineteen. I was content simply to enjoy the energy of their strides and their voices until one of them stopped walking and turned to face her friend. It was clear from their faces that the world around them had fallen away, their lives subsumed by the stream of words flowing between them. They were so intent on each other that I could have taken fifty pictures, but I didn’t need to. I sensed the perfection of that first shot in my mind as well as in my hand. And so, happy birthday. Those two don’t look anything like us, but it feels like our portrait nonetheless.

  Deb, I’ve been meaning to write you about something for a while, and I think you might know what it is. At first I thought moving to Arizona really was just a matter of honoring previous commitments and tidying loose ends, but it would be dishonest to pretend that the past two years of delays have been accidental. I know joining you in the desert might be all that we’ve been looking forward to, but what if it isn’t? The last time we lived on top of each other, everything about who we were was new and exciting and open to change. This made it easier to overlook our faults, but we’ve been ourselves for over twenty years now. I’ll never pay attention to a newspaper or devote myself to a cause, and you’ll never stop following your impulses, no matter where they may lead. We’ve been able to excuse ourselves these and other perceived failings at a distance, but could we up close? I can already hear you in my mind, because where I hesitate is exactly where you would leap—but Deb, you’ve got a talent for friends. You make them wherever you go, while I can count the friends I’ve made in my life on three fingers.

  In the ten months or so after I dropped out of school and, in the spirit of self-destruction and self-discovery, gave myself over to everything that everyone associates with Hollywood in the ’70s, I didn’t telephone Cleveland according to any set schedule. I remember dialing my grandmother around Christmastime from a party at a beach house, using a phone from one of its ten bedrooms so I wouldn’t have to call collect. Two months later, I was sitting on a patio with a poolside phone just like the ones in the movies, at a house where I’d spent the night. Though my general recollection of that period is spotty at best, I remember the exact date—Sunday, February 20, 1977—because as soon as Grandma heard my voice, she told me that my mother was dead. My legs shot straight out in front of me, tipping my chair sideways onto the ground, but I couldn’t feel anything, so it didn’t hurt. Because Grandma and I were both crying so hard, only half of what we were saying to each other made any sense. When she said I couldn’t come to the funeral, I thought she didn’t want me there. Very gradually, like a blind person trying to climb a series of barbed-wire fences, I realized it wasn’t that I was not invited: I was just horribly and permanently too late.

  For an indeterminate period of time after that call ended, I stared at some ants crawling in and out of a crack in a terra-cotta patio tile, until I can only assume someone found me, stood me up, and told me it was time to leave. My mother died on Friday, January 28, 1977. When I called home, she was already twenty-three days gone.

  The Last Self-Portraits

  * * *

  115. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 4:22 a.m.

  SAM DECKER: No one’s always healthy, so sometimes she got sick; except with her, it was more complicated. Once she had to go downtown. For a week they gave her antibiotics and transfusions until she got better again. The final time began the same way, except after a week she wasn’t any better, and they told her the cancer was back.

  It went fast after that. Dot and I took turns staying with her. Lilly wanted to go home, but the docs wouldn’t let her. Instead they started her on chemo along with everything else. Dot was a mess. She wanted to be with Lilly, but she was afraid Jane would call and she’d miss the chance to tell her what was happening. I went around to a bunch of stores until I found one with a telephone answering machine, which was something I’d only ever seen on The Rockford Files, a big ugly black box with buttons on it and tape cassettes inside. I hooked it up and helped Do
t put a message on it telling Jane everything that was going on. I kept coming over to make sure the thing was working, and to see if Jane had called, but the kid had phoned about three weeks before Lilly got sick so it didn’t seem likely.

  When Lilly realized she wouldn’t be going home, she asked me to bring her the timed-exposure camera. I knew all about how she’d done the portraits of her and Jane, but that contraption hadn’t come out of its box since she’d left New York. Boy, was that camera something. Not much in the looks department, but the mechanism was a real beaut. Even though Lilly gave the credit to some guy named Kubiak, it was clear from how she described it that she was the brains behind the gizmo. By this time, she was too weak to work the tripod. I set it up for her, then she adjusted it herself until it was the way she wanted. She had the cable release for it lying next to her on the bed. Every day at visiting hours, I’d check to see if she’d triggered the thing, thinking I could ride her about it, but she never had. She asked if I’d develop the film for her once it was exposed. When I told her that she could develop it herself after she got better, she looked so peeved that I told her I would do it.

  One day I’m talking to Lilly when she gasps and her eyes get wide. I’m thinking this is it until she starts crying and saying “Deb” over and over again. Suddenly, a long-haired woman with freckles is bending over the bed. The two of them are hugging and repeating each other’s names in a way that sounds like one of those languages where the same word said different ways means a dozen different things.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: Considering the last time I’d seen her was back in ’67, it would have been a shock no matter what, but Lilly in that hospital bed wasn’t anything I could have prepared myself for. I’d been to a few funerals by that point, so I knew death as a destination, but before Lilly, I didn’t know the journey. Lilly hadn’t asked me to come. She’d called to tell me she was in the hospital, but she hadn’t said, “Deb, I’m dying,” and I hadn’t come because I thought she was. When she got sick in ’70, Yuma was three and the school hadn’t been around long enough to feel like family. By the time the second sickness came, Yuma was ten and so used to everyone in the poetics department that I was sure he’d be fine without me for a little while.

  As soon as I saw Lilly, I knew. So did she; it was in her eyes, though knowing something isn’t the same as being at peace with it. Lilly was forty, and she wasn’t ready to die; but if she had to, she was going to die working.

  I’d never seen pain like hers up close. It would sweep down like an angry Old Testament god, then stay or leave on a whim. Mornings were her best times, so that’s when we would talk. Mostly we told our favorite stories about each other, a lot of deep remembering. After about an hour of this, I’d be as tired as she was. This gnawed at me until I realized we weren’t just talking: my brain was building shelves to store all those words in some more archival way, because I was about to be their only custodian.

  At one point she asked if I was disappointed in her. Why, I said, for only beating the odds three times over? Ninety-five percent of the people who’d gotten sick when she did were already dead. Was she asking if I was mad that she’d beaten leukemia for five years instead of ten or fifteen? Lilly shook her head. I never came to you, she said. I never met Yuma as a boy. We never taught together like I said we would. She looked so disappointed in herself that I knew I couldn’t laugh, even though I wanted to. Lilly, I said, I stopped expecting you to move to Arizona after you first turned me down back in ’74. Well, she certainly wasn’t expecting that. But Deb, she said as her eyes went big and round, all these years I really thought I was going to do it! I smiled and got her some water. It used to be when a person didn’t live up to something, I’d pitch accusations at them and jab at the air like I was fighting invisible dragons. I spent a lot of energy trying to make people in my image and then getting mad when they didn’t look the part, but if being a mother and a teacher has taught me anything, it’s that you have to work with what’s already there. I told Lilly there was a difference between a promise and an aspiration. The whole point of an aspiration is to make yourself reach. The only people who achieve everything they aspire to are lazy or cowards. If one of us had been either of those, we never would have stayed friends.

  Day after day, no matter how bad the pain got, Lilly wouldn’t let the docs give her anything for it: she wanted to stay present. I pointed out that when the pain took hold of her, she was gone anyway, so she might as well grant herself some relief, but Lilly was afraid that once she started on morphine, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Each day she asked if Jane had called, and each day something inside her clamped down tighter when we told her no. Lying in that bed, she came to look like a marathon runner, her muscles straining, her eyes focused on a distant point, except that she was trying to run away from something instead of toward it. Finally, I had to tell her it was okay to stop. She wasn’t a bad mother if she needed to leave without saying goodbye.

  116. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 4:43 a.m.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: I’d fallen asleep in a chair by the window like I always did, only this time I woke up to the sound of her camera. The room was silent except for that clicking sound, but inside my head, a congregation of voices suddenly started shouting Lilly’s name: some saying Goodbye, some saying Don’t go, and some reciting victory poems because she had managed to do this terrible, amazing thing.

  She’d picked her time well. It was late. There wouldn’t be anyone checking in on her until morning. My chair was positioned by the door in case the night nurse came. As long as that camera was running, I knew Lilly needed me to guard the space. I was desperate to go to the bed, to stroke her face and hold her hand, to do all the things the heart cries for when someone you love is leaving, but any one of those would have ruined the shot. And so I made myself stay exactly where I was.

  Lilly was very, very still. Her eyes were open and staring at the camera with such intensity that looking at her felt like staring at a bright light. I was perched at the edge of my seat, every muscle in my body frozen in the act of launching from that chair. I barely breathed or blinked as the camera clicked and the film advanced frame by frame. I sat there and caressed Lilly with my eyes. For each second of each minute of that last holy hour, my muscles strained and the voices in my head shouted and howled and sang, until the film ran out and the clicking stopped.

  SAM DECKER: Deb was the one who knew what funeral arrangements Lilly wanted, and who to contact at the Art Institute, and about the boxes she’d left behind—basically all the things Lilly had been hoping to tell Jane, and which, in the end, she told Deb instead. Deb got the newspaper to run an obituary, not one of those paid jobs but the real deal. She made the telephone calls. At the funeral, there was me, Dot, Deb, an old friend of Lilly’s from Brooklyn, and a bunch of students and teachers who’d known Lilly from the Art Institute. Afterwards we all went to the café where I’d remounted photos from Lilly’s show four years before. Dot was having a pretty hard time. I told her, for what it was worth, she had me now, and I was a stubborn old bastard who wasn’t going anywhere. I wish I could have been around for Meemaw the way I was for Dot, but most of life is just timing. It took me five years to get my head together after the army was done with me. By that time, all that was left of Meemaw was the building with the empty storefront where Anderssen’s Shoes had been.

  117. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 4:57 a.m.

  GRETE WASHINGTON: When Lillian left Brooklyn, she was so very ill that saying goodbye felt like the final farewell, but then came her letter to say that the treatment in Detroit was a success. What began as a small piece of hope grew larger, until I did not see its edges anymore. Lillian’s return to health did not bring our friendship back to what it once was. Even I, who do not like letting go, knew that this could not come back, but we exchanged letters. I wrote when Paul took Kaja to Liberia, and also when Kaja was accepted to university in Britain. Lillian wrote
when Jane went to California and again when Walter died. Our friendship was paler but a friendship still. Then Deborah’s phone call came. When Jane was not at the funeral, I cried for them both.

  After the service, Deborah and I did not bother with introductions, though meeting face-to-face felt quite strange. Hers were eyes I did not know, and yet I knew so much about the person behind them. I thought of a knot joining two threads, and of the way a vibration will travel from one thread to the other, passing through the knot along the way. Now the knot that had joined Deborah to me was gone.

  I asked Deborah if Lillian had been in much pain. She told me that Lillian had died according to her wishes. When Deborah explained about the camera, I laughed, and this made Deborah laugh also. Others near us were puzzled by this, but I could see it bothered Deborah as little as it bothered me. Good for Lillian, I said. I think it was good for Lilly, Deborah answered, even though it was very hard. She was always strong, I said. And stubborn, Deborah agreed as she smiled. So many stories were contained in that smile, stories we could share just by this curve we made with our mouths.

  Usually, when I speak to Lillian in my mind, it is to tell her about Kaja: about the man she met at King’s College whose parents came to Britain from Jamaica after the war; about the children she has had with him and my trips to England to see them; about my recognition that Kaja, like me, has made a home as far away from her parents as she could. Lillian’s answers in my mind do not include her voice. I cannot hear her voice anymore, but her eyes remain. Even when we disagreed, Lillian’s eyes stayed on my face, as if to remind me that our friendship would always have a place in this world.